By the time Grand Theft Auto III takes place in 2001, the Purple Nines begin selling SPANK on local streets. The Redjacks, particularly their leader D-Ice, is against the drug and starts set a civil war in the Hoods gang against the Purple Nines. Eventually the Purple Nines become defunct, after the Redjacks and Claude defeat them in a mêlée battle.

Curiously, the Redjacks and Purple Nines do not attack each other on the streets, and will even assist each other if one is wounded or in battle. This is presumably a glitch in the game, pertaining to all gang member characters being modeled after Southside Hoods. To cover up the error in the plot, D-Ice warns Claude that if he shoots at Nines, some Redjacks would assume they were under fire and shoot at him as well.

No Purple Nines Glitch

In Grand Theft Auto III, there is a glitch involving the Purple Nines, usually on the PS2. When the player starts the game for the first time, and gets all the way up to D-Ice's missions, and then does all of them, then the player will notice the Purple Nines will have vanished comepletely. If the player starts the game all over again with the same memory card inserted, the player will then realize the Purple Nines are still gone as the game "remembers" that you did the mission that caused the Purple Nines to stop spawning. Thus if the player starts again, and gets up to Uzi Money, then the Nines will not spawn and the player can continuously fail the mission, and this can prevent the player from getting 100%, same thing with the mission Rumble. So to fix this, try starting the game on a new memory card, or have backup saves, or try to do 100% and never re-start the game otherwise the glitch comes into effect. Another method is to start a new game without the memory card inserted, then re-insert the memory card and save your game.